Corning, cocaine, and local anesthesia

Dr Goldberg's centennial melodrama1 captures the historical events surrounding the discovery of cocaine as a local anesthetic in an informative, provocative and historically rich manner. We wish to add an additional player, James Leonard Corning, to the already renowned list of dramatis personae. Born in 1855 in Stamford, Conn, Corning studied at German universities in Heidelberg and Würzburg. Later, he became a prolific writer with an avid interest in neurology and was a frequent observer at the Roosevelt Hospital where Halsted performed his teaching.23 In 1885, one year after Carl Koller demonstrated the usefulness of cocaine as a surface analgesic, Corning4 designed a series of experiments to test this new agent on the spinal cord. He proposed that injections of cocaine into minute interspinal blood vessels located between the spinous processes would be rapidly transported to the spinal cord and affect a temporary transverse myelitis.